Tea -- Istanbul. A little tea shop in Balet, a wonderful colourful area of Istanbul: photo by Maciej Dakowicz, 8 May 2013

22:41 -- Cardiff, Wales, the chippy alley
on matchday. The guy literally dived into that pile of garbage a few
seconds before, just for fun I guess. He didn't realize that he could
get dirty a bit: photo by Maciej Dakowicz, 18 June 2008

Priest --Sonepur, India. A quiet moment in one of the temples of Sonepur: photo by Maciej Dakowicz, 18 November 2013

14 comments:

I enjoyed the song and video a lot (it kind of reminded me of first hearing Devo, but with a difference) and found the images you posted effectively unsettling. I wish I knew my thoughts better on "A Guide For Men." Unclarity arises, however, because I know and speak to so few people any more and I feel out of touch with almost everything. Curtis

To paraphrase Richard Heinberg: Civilization is a massive case of post-traumatic stress disorder, and has been from the get-go. The symptoms of PTSD include: -vigilance and scanning, -elevated startle response, -blunted affect or psychic numbing (the loss of the ability to feel), -denial (mental reorganization of the event to reduce pain, leading sometimes even to amnesia), -aggressive, controlling behavior, -interruption of memory and concentration, -depression, -generalized anxiety, -episodes of rage, -substance abuse, -intrusive recall and dissociative "flashback" experiences, -insomnia, -suicidal ideation, and -survivor guilt.

First, the title of the post is strictly my imposition, as is, of course, and as ever, my selection from the full range of the work. As the video should make clear, it's impossible to dismiss the public behaviour we are seeing here in the Cardiff shots by simply labeling it "Eee-yooh! Guy stuff! Disgusting!" The photographer's profile and video posted here should make it amply evident, women do the same stuff.

Second, and again perhaps this ought to go without saying, Maciej Dakowicz is not a party animal but a street photographer whose work reports but does not judge -- in which sense one might think of him as an ethnographer. He's worked all round the world. He comes from Poland but spent a decade or so in the UK, staying on for some years after attending university in Wales at Glamorgan. Since then he has moved on to conduct street photography workshops in Istanbul, Southeast Asia, Kolkata, Varanasi, among other places. He is now based in Mumbai.

Duncan, you might be interested in what Maciej has to say about that wonderful shot of "Huw in the club, Cardiff -- The Glamorgan County Council Staff Club".

"The Glamorgan County Council Staff Club was a pub in the city centre of Cardiff, on Westgate street. That old red brick corner building just in front of the Millennium Stadium. We called it the Staff Club. You could go there and always see someone you know. A special place and a second home for many of its customers.

"The pub was suddenly closed in October 2007 after almost 50 years of operation. At that time, the club was selected by the Cardiff branch of the Campaign for Real Ale as the club of the year and had about 6000 members, the vast majority employees and ex-employees of the city council. All attempts and hopes to reopen it failed and in the end of 2008, a year from its closure, the building was sold to a company that planned to open a trendy club or music venue there."

Leeds, Stoke, Nottingham, Reading, Worcester, Bristol - welcome to our Saturday night. I'm a believer in the crisis of masculinity thesis, but as Tom suggests, the girls get pretty scary too. Pig-out, barf, screw, ruck, get off your face, fall over, is what you do when the rest of the week is meaningless conformity to someone else's rules and for someone else's profit. And that doesn't seem to have changed much since Breughel was taking his Saturday night photos on the streets of Ghent (as it were) -

And as that article suggests, the bloke in the lilac frock in Cardiff is carrying on the great tradition of carnival cross-dressing, which brings us back to men but, in the spirit of the song, inside out and all over the place.

Your account of the social background of the ragged bacchanalia in the Saturday night streets sounds dead on. The article link didn't come up, but that Bruegel is certainly apropos. It should show up here: